In response to Pennywit's tirade against me, setting me up as a "straw man" to be knocked down for things I did not say or assert, I just have a few things in response:

Good intentions don't make good news reporting. Intending to use proper grammar does not make it so. Intentions of making a fabulous movie do not make it fabulous. Intending to write the Great American Novel does not win awards. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Pointing at the news consumer's perspective as irrelevant shows contempt for the consumer, which is one of the problems with the mainstream media. "It's all the consumers' fault," the media's old guard defenders cry. It's kind of like blaming the auto accident victim for Detroit's making of unsafe cars.

Blogs are not a medium that competes with the news. Blogs are like the telephone. Pennywit still feels threatened by this. I'm not sure why. Three generations or so ago, many people said the same about the telephone. Oooh, it's so bad, they would cry. Nobody will ever leave the house or see their neighbors again. Now we get the same gloom and doom claims -- mainstream media would be just hunky dory if it weren't for them damn bloggers. I say get over it. The bloggers are not responsible for the mainstream news media's marginalization. That is the mainstream news media's own fault -- and when I say that, I point more to the owners and editors than the reporters.

Pennywit points to the New York Times' few blurbs about protests during the RNC as proof that the mainstream media is on the job. But when I lived in New York, the Times did not report on the riots in Thompkins Square Park, instigated by the NYPD when they charged in on horseback into a peaceful demonstration. The Times did not report on the beating of eyewitnesses who had the misfortune of having video cameras in their hands. No, you had to get this from the Voice and from cable access. The Times notoriously did not report on the US activities in Central and South America. More than one reporter wrote long pieces for other publications expressing their frustration at how the Times editors did not want to rattle that cage. These are just a couple of areas that come to mind.

Of course, one could probably find some paper somewhere that reported on something. But the news experience is not one of spending hours on Lexis-Nexis finding obscure news that you probably never knew that you didn't know. The mainstream news experience consists of a few hundred words, at best, on this, that and the other thing, packaged into 18 or 19 minutes. The cable experience adds in the screeching baboon shows, labeling it their "fair and balanced" reporting. The local news throws in murders of people you've never heard of, in neighborhoods you've never been, and fires and car crashes -- "Put the widow on the set, we need dirty laundry" -- and let's not forget the helicopter coverage of car chases and the "we got more doppler radar than you" weather coverage. And spliced in the midst of all this are interstitial commercials shoving crap you don't want or need into your face -- "Are you shy in crowds? You might have Social Anxiety Disorder!" -- paid for by the multinational conglomerates whose products the news will not cover critically.

Let my close by saying this: I am not a reporter. I do not claim to be. To assert that I'm not reporting news better than the mainstream media is just plain silly -- I'm not trying to. I also think that oversized SUVs are ecological, economic and safety horrors on the highways, but I don't build SUVs. Nor do I cook lobster, but serve me a rotten one and I will send it back. Pennywit seems to be protesting critical thinking on the part of the citizens. Apparently we aren't supposed to question the conventional wisdom they feed us. We're supposed to be couch potatoes, drinking in whatever they decide to feed us for whatever reason, and accept it as gospel.

Neither did I dismiss expertise itself, as Pennywit claims. (For being a self-described reporter, the paragon of virtue, the acme of knowledge, Pennywit certainly gets an awful lot wrong about the things I write.) I just question that the journalist has it by merit of receiving a paycheck, and the citizen does not have it by merit of not being a journalist. But let's face it, a lot of journalism is stupid, shallow, inane. A lot of it is punched up, given edge, hyped. The press pass is not exactly a badge of credibility.

Pennywit likes to find refuge in the exceptions to the rule. Yes, there are some great investigative reporters, and some of them are actually paid to investigate (though many seem to languish in one-day-a-story assignments). I am an avid reader of The New Yorker, which features some truly outstanding investigative pieces. But I don't read Time. I don't read People. I don't read The Weekly World News. The exceptional exceptions don't make the whole smell rosy, just like a good apple in a rotten barrel doesn't make the barrel fresh and edible.

To boot, in the areas where I am an expert, I see a lot of inane reporting. On events I've witnessed, I've seen and heard reportage that seemed spun out of total fiction. On in-depth topics, I've seen as much shallow, knee-jerk, uniformed journalism as is found on "news blogs" out there. No, I'm sorry. The paycheck is not a backstage pass on the truth.

Yet in general I don't blame the reporters. The news media are broken, and the guilty, imho, are the corporate owners. PBS and NPR seem to be having problems, too, with journalists getting into hot water when they venture to criticize one of the corporate sponsors. But don't take my word for it. I defer authority on that topic to BillMoyers, who knows a thing or three about pressures on media to spin news as pro-corporate.

Pennywit finally tries to find refuge in that tired old homily about how they're just satisfying audience demand. But I ask, when every single channel is covering the same thing, where is the choice? How many times do I need to see Michael Jackson's perp walk, or Pope smoke, or poor Terri Schiavo's brain-dead body? Where is the hard news television network? In all the coverage of the War on Iraq, where is the coverage of the American casualties? Where is the coverage of the Iraqi casualties? Why do we get no more than what the Pentagon or Bush has to say on the matter? Why does a half-hour of BBC news tell me more than 24 hours of CNN?

You can't tell me there's no demand for real news, when nobody in the US MSM has ever tried it in 20 years.

Finally, again I will say that I never said blogs are replacing the news. Blogs are our voices of frustration as news consumers. So rather than deal with the tired old crap that's being fed by the corporate voiceboxes of Murdoch and GE and Disney, we look elsewhere, and point each other to alternative sources of information.

Kids smell bullshit, and getting all self-righteous about it won't make that sense go away. And trying to point fingers at bloggers is just plain silly: you're not pointing at competition, you're pointing at your own audience. Physician, heal thyself.

Taking issue with what I and Matsu had to say about the corporate-owned-and-sponsored mainstream media's attidues about blogs, Pennywit writes:

Media Girl and other liberals like to rave about the corporate media. Meanwhile, conservatives constantly find grist for their "liberal media" theories. And liberal and conservative bloggers both enjoy getting up on the High Blogging Horse to rant at the old media for just not Getting It, whatever "It" might be."It" is that blogging is communication, not a one-way media form. It's like the telephone, only more interconnected, less binary. "It" is a change the change in the dynamic of public discourse. The mainstream media, however, treat "the bloggers" like a new cable news channel. It's a misconception that feeds into their fears that they're losing touch.

Until now, We The People could be heard directly only by marching en masse. The mainstream media decided what was "fit to print" and what wasn't. For example, during last year's Republican National Convention, the mainstream media figured that over 100,000 people marching in protest in New York City was not fit to print. Mass arrests were not fit to print.

This is just one way how the mainstream media has been failing us.

But with blogging -- which is still quite new but growing fast, and is just one way in which citizens are finding empowerment in the 21st century -- We The People can do more than just shout in outrage at the miscoverage or non-coverage of current events. Now we are hearing each other's dissent, and we're finding that we're all feeling the same way.

The fact that the right wing grassroots also feel that the mainstream media is failing them I think only lends credence to what I believe is the real reason why television news and newspaper circulations are down: they are not telling the truth. They report on politicans' spin and call it news. They give equal voice to different sides of spin, and they call it news.
But I have to ask:

* How many bloggers are bona fide experts on their subject, whether that subject be sports, arts, or health-care policy?If you actually look, there are experts in all fields, and many of them are blogging about it. Many of these are experts who do not have buddies in the corporate newsrooms. In fact, the newsrooms don't want experts, they want bloviators who will spout outrageous crap. They like conflict, and will try to sell it time and time again.

* How many bloggers march, unarmed, into a warzone and send reports back to the American public?How many bloggers from those occupied countries would ever get the chance to report on mainsream news outlets what they're seeing and experiencing?

* How many bloggers track down sources and hound those sources until they consent to an interview?How many news people do this? There's no budget for investigative journalism any more. "A mile wide and an inch deep" is the self-criticism coming from reporters who are disgruntled with the decisions made in the corporate boardrooms. News is not as profitable as other ventures, so it's not considered deserving of funding to do the job right.

* How many bloggers slog through a two-hour town hall meeting and write up the results (schools and sewers) for a waiting public?Again, how many reporters actually do this? In fact, in each of those meetings there are more than likely many times more bloggers than reporters. But you don't hear from them. Why? Because the reporters have the distribution. It doesn't mean the reporter is right or doesn't have a bias or isn't under an editorial imperative to tell the story from a given angle. It just means the reporter has the distribution.

Some reporters do great work. Unfortunately, most of them are no longer employed by mainstream media outlets -- if they ever were. They have cashed in their chips and gone off and written books or in-depth articles that get sold freelance.

And then there's the great reporting that never sees the light of day. Central America is not newsworthy so we never hear about what's going on there, even when our own government is directly involved. We don't hear about Iraqi casualties. Why? Because it's not "fit to print." No, we need to go online to find these things.

We go online to find foreign news sources, too. Funny how when you look at the international news how it becomes so clear that we live in this news bubble, with our own skewed version of the world.

To go by our mainstream news media, Michael Jackson is more important than the war on Iraq. So is Martha Stewart. We should be obsessing about a "runaway bride" rather than the corruption scandals in the House of Representative. We should be focusing on whether an American Idol contestant had sex with a judge rather than about the ballooning trade deficit or nuclear proliferation or global warming or crackdowns in Russia or any number of other issues.

They insist on reporting on irrelevancies, and then wonder that they are found to be increasingly irrelevant.

In the run-up to the war, what the mainstream media did was an obscenity. The nationalistic cheerleading and uncritical reporting on what the government was claiming led to a great bamboozling of the public, where a huge percentage actually believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 and that he was about to bomb the heartland of America.

That is the failing of the news media, not the bloggers. The popularity of blogs is a symptom of journalism's failings, not the cause.
A few bloggers do some or all of the above, but those bloggers are in the very small minority. Most bloggers, in fact, are commentators, not reporters. They aggregate other people's work, rely on other people's reporting, and build opinions based on hard work of professional journalists.Most bloggers also never claim to be reporters. Most bloggers are quite openly and honestly just sharing their opinions. There's no pretense that bloggers are reporting news.

The blogs with the highest traffic are quite open about this. And when they do report on something, they cite their sources with hyperlinks and quotes. Often it's more than one source. In fact, a vast majority of blogging is actually blogging about what reporters are reporting, with citations.

What the mainstream media don't like is that this means the audience has become critical consumers. Instead of just accepting whatever crap they try to feed us, we actually have become more discerning, more skeptical, and more proactive about finding out the real story.

And that is why the old guard feels threatened.

The blogs are not a news medium, they are the voices of the news consumers. They -- we -- have opinions about what they -- we -- are reading and hearing, and some people just don't like that. But guess what, guys -- it's a reality. It's happening.

The mainstream media have the budgets, they have the rock star reporters, they have the cameras, they have the distribution -- but they don't have the willingness to actually do the job that's necessary to produce strong news. The star reporters seem to think that their shit doesn't stink, and just because they did real investigative journalism years ago they should get a pass on the crap they try to push off as news today. But that doesn't wash. That boat don't float. They're trying to sell us a pig in a poke, and we aren't buying.

Show me a news organization that invests large amounts into establishing real international news bureaus, into giving reporters the time and resources to do investigative reporting, and combine that with an editorial and corporate willingness to report on the news, rather than feed the public wrap-arounds for Viagra commercials and call it news, and a willingness to "risk" criticizing the government and to hell with "loss of access" they fear as a consequence -- show me these things, and I will show you a news organization that stands to increase its audience to the point of dominance. The people want news, and they aren't getting it.

Until then, all the "noble reporter" homilies in the world will not convince me that CNN or Fox or even the New York Times is feeding me anything but what they find convenient to sell, rather than what is most important for us to know as citizens in this country. They believe that they benefit from a disempowered audience. That is their blindness. They see darkness and declare that the sky is falling, when all they need do is open their eyes.

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It's bad enough to applaud a man whose claim to fame is having gotten into the White House press room using a fake name to toss the president softball questions, a man whose online presence has been more in the lines of pornography and prostitution than either journalism or blogging, but to put him on this panel, whose sole liberal voice is a comic blogger, also seems to reflect a conservative bias.

Don't get me wrong, I think Ana Marie Cox is great. Hers was one of the first blogs I read regularly. But having her as the sole liberal voice on a three-person panel that ostensibly is to take on such a serious question as blogging and journaism is kind of like having Jon Stewart as the liberal analyst on a panel exploring cable news. It promises to be funny, and I'm sure there could be some zingers, but this is the National Press Club, not a Friar's roast. Wouldn't one of the more notable serious bloggers have merited an invitation?

And so when Sean-Paul put this petition together, I thought it worthwhile to sign it, mainly because as a serious organization the NPC might better take blogging a little more seriously. If this panel ends up on C-SPAN, you can bet that it will get a lot more attention than otherwise. This petition letter is really an attempt to get the National Press Club to actually pay attention to the questions it's raising with this panel, and how their current choices threaten to make a mockery of the whole thing.

I'm not a member of the National Press Club. I'm not a journalist. I'm not much of a blogger. But I do see that the MSM -- this time as represented by a professional journalists' association -- are again just not getting "the bloggers" and are perpetuating stereotypes.

If you want to join this petition, go here and write Sean-Paul at
seanpaul-at-agonist.org.

In case you haven't seen this yet, here is some "fair and balanced" reporting. I don't know which is more pathetic -- Jessica Simpson's eight dozen products (it's all about shelf space, doncha know), or this Fox chucklehead's eagerness to indulge in his own sexual depravity on national news.

I hope the owner of that arm got a hefty bonus for that day. You know, hazardous duty pay.